Cross-border payments platform Nium is expanding its treasury infrastructure to enable FIs to route liquidity dynamically across traditional and digital asset networks. The initiative addresses the structural inefficiencies of legacy cross-border corridors by merging traditional fiat routing with digital asset settlement layers.
In an exclusive interview, Santhosh Srinivasan, the vice president of treasury at Nium, sat down with The Fintech Times to discuss how the convergence of fiat and blockchain rails directly addresses the multi-trillion-dollar liquidity trap caused by legacy settlement systems, clearing the path for widespread institutional digital asset adoption.
Legislative progress in the US Senate regarding the CLARITY Act drives this institutional shift. Srinivasan explained that while previous legislative milestones like the GENIUS Act provided issuer-side certainty, the upcoming market-structure framework removes the final governance obstacles for Tier-1 banks. “When the GENIUS Act passed, the institutional posture shifted from ‘let’s experiment’ to ‘let’s integrate’ almost overnight,” Srinivasan said, noting that counterparty conversations accelerated immediately. The evolving regulatory framework provides the clarity required by risk committees to deploy digital asset rails alongside traditional networks such as Swift and SEPA Instant under a single, unified governance model.
The primary constraint within global commerce remains capital inefficiency rather than execution velocity. Approximately $27trillion to $30trillion currently sits idle in global nostro and correspondent banking accounts solely to ensure that cross-border payments clear across conflicting time zones. Legacy infrastructure suffers from batch-oriented settlement windows, fragmented cut-off times, and reconciliation lags. To bridge this gap, modern financial technology platforms must emphasise real-time treasury data and regulated on- and off-ramps. Funding cross-border payouts via stablecoins and settling in either fiat or USDC at the point of delivery removes the systemic requirement to pre-fund accounts, freeing up massive pools of idle capital for corporate treasuries.
Achieving this level of interoperability requires compliance protocols to function natively at the point of origination. Rather than treating risk mitigation as a secondary step, screening, sanctions, and anti-money laundering controls must execute before a system routes a payment to any network. Nium achieves this by utilising directly licensed infrastructure across more than 40 markets, allowing the organisation to manage its compliance posture end-to-end without relying on complex aggregator chains. Furthermore, strategic partnerships with regulated digital asset entities, including Circle and Coinbase, ensure that the risk profile of on-chain transactions mirrors traditional fiat legs precisely, delivering a frictionless experience for institutional clients.
This multi-rail architecture creates immediate opportunities for automated treasury management through advanced technologies like agentic artificial intelligence. In scenarios such as global payroll and supplier distributions, which traditionally require multi-day automated clearing house processing and extended foreign exchange exposure, agentic automation orchestrates funding dynamically. Systems score payment instructions in real time against cost, currency rates, network speeds, and counterparty risk to determine the optimal pathway. Capital routes instantly across domestic networks or converts into digital assets for localised off-ramps at the final destination, shrinking foreign exchange exposure from days to minutes.
As multi-rail money movement transitions into a baseline utility over the coming years, market leadership will belong to providers capable of treating digital assets as balance-sheet instruments rather than transactional novelties. Long-term differentiation in the payments sector depends entirely on the geographical depth of a provider’s licensed network, the intelligence of its automated orchestration layer, and the ability to seamlessly bridge the gap between stored-value assets and active liquidity management.